This year’s theme for the Promising Practices Conference was “STEM Education in Urban Environments.” The crowd at the conference was very diverse, there were teacher candidates like myself, professors, teachers from local high schools, presenters. The conference addressed issues in urban education and innovative pedagogy in STEM through a variety of topics including social justice, youth development, health equity, economics, and career development. Here are the proposal submissions which addressed awareness about correlating and addressing social issues and systems with outcomes in STEM education. Ideas of having confidence, exploring issues of student/teacher identity, and purpose. Making connections and exploring relationships between STEM and everyday life was something that was expressed deeply by the keynote speaker Dr. Edmin. Finally, he talked about the concept of being creative and to examine new approaches to engage students, teachers and community in learning.
I certainly struggled with this conference. There were definitely some useful things I learned and could see myself doing in my future classroom and some other things made me go hmm. The first session I attended was the hands-on learning were the teacher taught us to create models of earth systems that explain ocean currents and other density driven Earth processes. This presentation was fun in the sense that we got to see how she sets up her classes and how everything is basically hands on. The description in the catalog does not do her justice of what she actually did because in that presentation we were her students. She went through an assessment she would give, question by question and went over the answers. I know this presentation was geared toward science concepts being learned through activity but this presentation felt like we were in science class again instead of showing us many different ways of doing hands-on learning. After the presentation she asked how many people in the room were there for science and only 4 people raised their hands out of 30. Most people in the room were very disappointed because we knew the session was going to be science based but we wanted new ideas, new strategies, not copies of her assessments.
The second session was on comedy in the classroom and again it was not what I expected. The presenter and the TALL University students showed us their Learning Strategies. The students were all elementary age and they showed us how you can use comedy to develop critical thinking. The students showed us how they have songs for learning about math, something most students think is hard, but through singing the song they see that math is easy. We did lots of activities that made us feel uncomfortable at first but after seeing everyone else being a bit awkward too, it lightened the mood. I think the presentation was good, they showed us how you can sing songs, do skits and ice breakers to lighten the mood, but I never heard anyone say ‘using comedy in the classroom’ I didn't really find anything in their very funny and to be completely honest it was primarily geared to elementary education. I was hoping that this would be about how you can do funny activities with your students or teaching in a humorous way, not about getting in a circle and singing math songs because realistically if a teacher grades 6-12 were to start singing about math the students would automatically be turned off and would not find it funny. I remember in my high school Spanish class, my teacher expected us to sing. At the beginning of the year set the rules for the class and made us aware that we would have to sing, so it was something we were ready for. Once a week or every other week she would print the lyrics to a current song on the top-hits of Spanish music and we would listen to the song first and then sing it. Of course some of us giggled at first because singing in high school with 25 kids isn’t exactly ‘fun’ but we expected it so many of us didn't mind.
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